Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 is looking good, less brown

Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 is out. New features include social networking integration …

Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers.

Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme—a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu's visual identity.

Canonical's Ayatana team has continued its effort to overhaul the panel. Ubuntu 10.04 introduces a new application indicator system that will streamline the panel notification area. The panel has also gained a new menu—referred to as the Me Menu—for managing instant messaging presence and posting short messages to social networking Web sites. The social networking functionality is powered by Gwibber, my open source microblogging application, which was added to Ubuntu for version 10.04. Another application that's new in Lucid is Pitivi, a simple video editing tool. In a controversial move, the Ubuntu developers have decided to remove the GIMP, the popular image editing program.

The new theme has benefited from further refinement since its initial inclusion. Some of the more garish elements, like the strong hash marks on the scrollbars that we saw in the original version, have been smoothed out and made more subtle. Several bugs have also been addressed, such as the problems we previously encountered with OpenOffice.org menu highlighting. The Ubuntu Software Center has also gained an improved look that matches the new Ubuntu branding.

The beta is not quite ready for use in production environments, but it's already fairly robust and ready for widespread testing. You can download it from the Ubuntu Web site. If you would like to test it in a virtualized environment without having to change your current Ubuntu installation, you might want to try the TestDrive tool. For more details about 10.04 beta 1, check out the official release notes.

88 Reader Comments

i wished they would of installed openshot rather than that POS pitivi. not only is pitivi missing the most basic features, development has stalled over the months. openshot has most features that amateurs and even skilled editors want and it's constantly being worked on.

Could you guys -please- at least link full-resolution versions of screenshots? It's pretty hard to see anything relevant besides what colors it uses like this, and seeing what the theme is like is supposed to be the entire point.

Really disappointing. The fact that it looks like 2 separate color/style themes, one for the menu/toolbars, one for everything else is really jarring and in poor taste. I don't know what these guys are thinking there.

It doesn't really bother me that the window buttons have move from the right to the left-hand side with the new themes, but if they are going to move the buttons, I really, really wish they would have put the buttons in the same order they are in on OS X. What they did smacks of being different just for the sake of being different.

Okay. I have resisted commenting about the UI changes until now, silently hoping the finalized look would move the caption buttons back where they belong. Looks like it's here to stay, though, so here we go. I'm not trollin' either, this is totally sincere:

- Caption buttons on the left side are stupid, especially when you left-justify the title text, and don't have an icon to help differentiate windows visually when only a small portion is visible beneath another window.

- Reversing the order of the maximize/minimize buttons is stupider. People who don't use them won't notice too much, people who depend on them will feel impeded by the UI, which is the exact opposite of good UI design.

- Reversing some buttons, but failing to put the close button in the corner-most position is flat out crazy. Once again, keyboard-people won't care, but simply closing a window with a mouse click is now a precision effort instead of a reflex developed over 15 years.

- Positioning menus and buttons close to one another sounds great, until you mistakenly close a window when you were aiming for the 'edit' menu. Again, needless work that could be avoided just by sticking to old, sensible paradigms that were more forgiving about hasty mousing.

Anyway, I'll at least give it a try out of respect for their effort. But I give myself 24 hours before I switch to a window style with the buttons in the proper place, which will almost certainly be available from someone with less patience than I have.

The rest of the release I'm looking forward to. I tend to have much better experiences with their LTS releases than the normal semiannual ones.

I installed this on my laptop along side Windows XP and it is working great. I know it's only a "beta" and shouldn't be used on a real machine yet, but it is working perfectly fine with no issues.

I did have some issues setting it up though, mainly it had trouble making a new hard drive partition in the installer. I had 16 GB free on my drive and it couldn't resize it to install. Once I deleted some files and defragmented the drive the install worked though.

The close, minimize, and maximize buttons can very easily be moved back to the right hand side of the screen. That was one of the first things I did.

Overall it's a very nice operating system and handles nicely on my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop, which is a few years old already.

I'd be very interested if Ars could do a bit of an extended piece on the 'button placement' issue. There seems to be quite a bit of backlash on this from the community and I have to admit it will probably be yet another nugget of Canonical Wisdom that I un-do every time I install the distro (see: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart the X-Server).

While I echo most of the arguments against the button move (if will confuse and annoy users without adding any correspondingly useful benefit), what really bothers me is that they are doing this on a LTS release. I would have hoped that they would have learned from the Hardy release that making large-scale, untested architectural and UI changes for a LTS is not a good idea (remember all the fun we had dealing with the Pulse Audio server when it first came out). Frankly, I hardly understand why Canonical even bothers with the LTS idea since the LTS's they release tend to be less-stable than the regular updates.

The dark theme is causing all sorts of issues with applications that assume a light theme. Look at the URLs in Firefox's awesome bar. Also the menu bar and title bar are the same color, which makes it impossible to know where to click when you want to drag the window. The right click menu changes based on where you click, and there is no UI indication of where this line is making it confusing. Overall it just isn't very consistent. Different apps handle the colors differently.

Ever fired up out of the box gnome on a 1024x768 screen e.g. on an older laptop, there is no screen real estate left after the oversized buttons, oversized menu bar row height, oversized everything.

On a modern widescreen monitor its nice but on smaller res it looks ridiculous. Have tried some slim GTK theme attempts but they all end up making menus look funny... the curse of open source GUI design strikes again

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace not killing the X server was actually an upstream decision, if I remember correctly (X.org changed the default, and Canonical just went with it).

On the button issue: Maybe I'm weird, but I'm firmly in the "double-click the window icon (control box) to close windows" camp when using Windows-- Metacity already broke my muscle memory as far as this is concerned (since a double-click doesn't close the window there; it just displays the menu). Not sure what I think about the new layout yet... I'm not opposed to having controls on the right, but the close button is in an awfully awkward spot (and it moves if a window doesn't have a maximize or minimize button!).

I wish they'd fix the trivial but showstopping Firefox issue. Within a few months of release, Firefox is all fucked up. I'd love to recommend Ubuntu to people who want to try Linux, but I know this will send them running.

Just package up the official binaries and then leave it alone. No one wants your asinine adware.

It's a shame Ubuntu uses Gnome by default when KDE is so much superior. It's time to put aside nationalism and give consumers the better option even if KDE originated from Europe.

Nationalism? GNOME was mainly initiated by developers in Mexico and a lot of its development was done in the Americas, whereas Ubuntu is a South African distro. They also have a KDE-flavored spin called Kubuntu. And an Xfce-based version called Xubuntu. And I think they're coming out with an LXDE version called Lubuntu. They even have a desktopless server edition so you can put whatever you want up there without the works being gummed up.

The dark theme is causing all sorts of issues with applications that assume a light theme. Look at the URLs in Firefox's awesome bar. Also the menu bar and title bar are the same color, which makes it impossible to know where to click when you want to drag the window. The right click menu changes based on where you click, and there is no UI indication of where this line is making it confusing. Overall it just isn't very consistent. Different apps handle the colors differently.

I filed that bug against the awesome bar years ago. Mozilla is just never going to fix it, I guess.

Refused to even boot on my older Pentium 4 desktop. Or maybe it just hung for a bit. I don't know, I was rather impatient, so I gave up quickly and instead stuck the disc into the laptop. Aside from the usability issues already echoed here (button placement and so on) I rather liked what I saw with the software center.

The rest of this is all window dressing until audio works at least as well as the audio in Windows 2000. I'm not asking for cutting edge audio control, only for what Windows has been doing for over a decade. Wanting each application to have an individual audio control is not a big ask, it's a necessity.

Pulse is supposed to do this, but all too often Pulse just doesn't work.

Because of the audio issues, I've stopped using Ubuntu.Because of the audio issues, I've stopped recommending Ubuntu.When they fix the audio, when they make it "just work", I'll go back to Ubuntu.

They also need a lightweight Ubuntu that will actually run well on old hardware. As things stand now, Windows XP runs MUCH better on 5 year old hardware than either Ubuntu or Xubuntu. (Don't get me started on Xubuntu, it's a complete mess).

Until the forces behind Ubuntu realize that they're putting successive new coats of paint on a house with rotten timbers, I'm continue to stay far, far away.

The dark theme is causing all sorts of issues with applications that assume a light theme. Look at the URLs in Firefox's awesome bar. Also the menu bar and title bar are the same color, which makes it impossible to know where to click when you want to drag the window. The right click menu changes based on where you click, and there is no UI indication of where this line is making it confusing. Overall it just isn't very consistent. Different apps handle the colors differently.

If you really want a fix for this, I have been using this Stylish (google it) userstyle for a long time to fix Firefox's awesomebar URLs when using New Wave and other dark themes. All you need to change the color of the links is this piece of CSS:

If you want an Ubuntu that runs as well on 5-year-old hardware as does a 9-year-old version of Windows, try running a 5-year-old version of Ubuntu, i.e. 5.04.

You have an interesting way of counting the age of an OS. I consider the age of an OS to restart at the last major update. By that measure, XP SP3 is slightly less than 2 years old. XP is still being sold in brand new machines and will continue to feature regular security updates for many years to come.

In any event, I'm not comparing the 9 year old version of XP with the latest Ubuntu, I'm comparing 2 year old version of XP with one and two year old versions of Ubuntu. On the measure of system speed, Ubuntu loses that battle quite dramatically.

We've seen this same battle in the marketplace. Ubuntu was directly competing with XP in the netbook market. Unfortunately, XP Won. A big reason for this was that Ubuntu runs far worse on slower machines than does XP. That's before we even get into the audio and video issues.

I want to like Ubuntu, I really do. I wish for nothing more than to remove Microsoft products from all my machines, but not if I have to spend days (or weeks) finicking with any given install just to get it (and keep it) functioning at a minimum level of effectiveness. Not when a new update causes all manor of problems that require more days of messing about just to get the systems working properly.

There is absolutely no reason that a Linux system designed for desktop use should run slower than a Windows system, none at all. Yet it does.

In my experience, most of those who put a toe into Ubuntu's waters are doing it on older, disused hardware. They're not buying new machines with the intent of installing Linux. They're trying to find uses for older hardware. With those I work and speak with, their Ubuntu experience on older hardware, like mine, has been far less than grand.

Ubuntu needs to stop worrying about competing with Aero Glass, fix the core parts of the OS that are critically broken (Pulse audio), and drastically lighten up the OS. Everything else is just window dressing.